By on July 27th, 2012

Implementing WS2012 Release Candidate on HP ProLiant Servers

If you would like to install Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate (including Windows Server 2012 Essentials) on to a HP ProLiant server, then HP have a handy PDF document for you.

Implementing WS2012 Release Candidate on HP ProLiant Servers

The 12 page PDF includes pre-installation tasks and installation instructions for supported HP ProLiant servers which include the ProLiant MicroServer

Also included are known issues and their workarounds in this handy technical white paper which you can download from here.

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By on July 26th, 2012

Email Options Supported by WS2012e

The Windows Server Essentials and Small Business Server Blog has a post (and a video) on the email options which are supported in Windows Server 2012 Essentials.

Email Options in WS2012e

First up we are told about an on-premises Exchange server, next Office 365 and finally third-party hosted email services.

An essential read for all users of Windows Server 2012 Essentials, which you can find here.

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By on July 26th, 2012

Icy Dock Dual-Bay 2.5” HDD Backplane with Slim Optical Drive Slot

Icy Dock have announced the MB994IPO-3SB, a dual-bay 2.5" SATA/SAS/SSD mobile rack backplane with a slim optical disk drive (ODD) slot, for use in a single 5.25" device bay.

Icy Dock MB994IPO-3SB

The MB994IPO-3SB is ideal for use in the  HP ProLiant MicroServer enabling you to have an additional 2 hard drive bays plus the optical disk too.

A full review is available from StorageReview.com

Thanks to the Tenniswood Blog for the heads up.

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By on July 25th, 2012

WS2012e Assessment and Deployment Kit

The Windows Server Essentials and Small Business Server Blog has announced that German, French, Chinese and Japanese beta versions of Windows Server 2012 Beta Essentials are available for download.

ADK Documentation

Also announced in the same post was the availability of the Windows Server 2012 Beta Essentials Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK). ADK is a collection of tools, binaries, and operating system language packs that you can use to customize, assess, and deploy Windows Server 2012 Essentials on new computers.

All the links are available on the Windows Server Essentials and Small Business Server Blog.

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By on July 25th, 2012

Western Digital Red HDD Reviewed at Toms Hardware

Toms Hardware have a thorough 9 page review on the NAS-Specific Western Digital Red hard drives.

Toms Hardware Reviews the WD Red

Lots of benchmarks are the order of the day with a splash of temperature and power consumption too:

“We can wholeheartedly recommend the Western Digital Red drives in their intended application: small business NAS appliances. I/O generally isn’t emphasized in that scenario, and the drives do demonstrate good streaming and sequential read/write performance (at 110 MB/s). This leads to fast transfers of large files, a common task in network-attached workloads.”

You can read the full review here.

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By on July 25th, 2012

Mountain Lion Server

With OS Mountain Lion coming out on the Mac App Store for $19.99 today, the Cult of Mac website takes a look at the Server edition of Mountain Lion.

lion server app

The article looks at the various features of the server edition including the server app, file sharing, the profile manager, collaboration and deployment.

You can read about these various features here.

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By on July 24th, 2012

On Premises Exchange Integration with WS2012e

Website Title (Required) shows us how easy it is to setup On Premises (OP) integration with an Exchange server with Windows Server 2012 Essentials:

“…i wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to setup the OnPrem (OP) integration with an Exchange server, and how it is possible to access both, using 1 single public IP address.”

First we are shown how to modify group membership before installing the WSE Connector software. Next we install the server roles which are required for Exchange before actually installing Exchange and configuring it. The SSL certificate for Exchange is then installed, Outlook Anywhere is enabled then Application Request Routing is installed to WSE. Finally we enable WSE Exchange Integration.

Enable Outlook Anywhere

The full tutorial can be found here.

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By on July 24th, 2012

The Features in Windows Server 2012

Windows Server 2012 Logo

A couple of articles for you on Windows Server 2012 the OS behind the new WS2012e.

First up InfoWorld takes a look at Server 2012 and its features in a 3 page article. Next WindowsITPro looks at the top ten storage enhancements in Windows Server 2012 which include a revised Chkdsk, thin provisioning, data deduplication, Storage Spaces and the Resilient File System (ReFS).

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By on July 23rd, 2012

My Server for WS2012e for Windows Phone

My Server Logo

My Server (codename) for Windows Server 2012 Essentials is available for Windows Phone users on the Marketplace.

The public beta of My Server enables server status monitoring, management for both users and devices and also allows for media consumption on your Windows Phone.

My Server Alerts My Server Devices

My Server Users My Server Account

The app can be found here or can be found by searching for ‘My Server’.

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By on July 23rd, 2012

Multimedia Activities may Cause a Computer that is Running WS2012e to Stop Responding

Microsoft have issued a fix for Windows Server 2012 (which includes WS2012e) and Windows 8 Release Preview where Multimedia or communication activities may cause the computer to stop responding.

Multimedia Activities may Cause a Computer that is Running WS2012e to Stop Responding

The system may randomly stop responding (hang) when you work on multimedia or communication activities. This problem may occur during video editing, unified communications, or any other multimedia activities.

This problem occurs because of an issue in the interaction between the state-machine driving dynamic tick transitions and the state-machine-driving clock rate changes.

Microsoft have released an update via the optimal updates panel in Windows Update to fix this problem. More details are available from here.

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